Luxe, calme et volupté

A naked picnic on a golden Mediterranean shore, built entirely from separate flecks of color after one summer at Signac’s elbow, and the last picture Matisse made before he threw the dot away and broke toward Fauvism.

1. 1
   The bathers on the shore

   Center and right foreground, the cluster of nude women on and around a spread cloth at the water’s edge

   The subject is a group of nude bathers relaxing on a Mediterranean beach, a timeless golden-age idyll rather than a real moment. The poses, toweling off, reclining, standing, descend from the long tradition of bathers in a landscape, and they owe most to a picture Matisse actually owned: Cézanne’s small Three Bathers, bought from the dealer Vollard in 1899 and kept for some thirty years as a touchstone. Matisse stages them as a pastoral fantasy, not a Saint-Tropez snapshot.
2. 2
   The picnic spread

   Lower center, the cloth laid on the sand with figures gathered around it

   A picnic on the shore, a teapot and food set out on a white cloth, turns the scene into a leisure ritual. Later scholars often read it as Matisse answering Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) and the whole bather-picnic theme, though that is a critics’ reading rather than anything Matisse said, and a secondary one beside the Cézanne source.
3. 3
   The divisionist marks (really dashes)

   Everywhere across the surface, easiest to test in the sand and sky

   The whole picture is built from separate touches of unmixed color meant to blend in the eye rather than on the palette. But Matisse’s marks are short, blocky dashes, coarser than Seurat’s neat round dots. Stand back and they fuse into shimmering light; step close and the surface is a mosaic of distinct strokes.
4. 4
   Arbitrary color creeping in

   The figures’ skin (greens, blues and pinks no body is) and the heightened sand and water

   The color has already slipped its leash from description: the flesh carries green and blue, and the shore and sky run hotter and stranger than nature. This is the Fauvist impulse, color chosen for feeling rather than accuracy, already at work inside the orderly dot, the tendency that would soon burst the method even though this is not yet a settled Fauve picture.
5. 5
   The Arcadian shore and the boat

   The background, the bay, the distant sailboat, and the line of hills meeting the sky

   A calm bay with a single sailboat and a low line of hills sets the scene in an idealized, sun-struck nowhere, the calm and luxury of Baudelaire’s refrain turned into a place. The landscape is a generalized golden-age coast (an Arcadia, the ancient poets’ name for an imagined pastoral paradise), not a topographic view of Saint-Tropez.
6. 6
   The painted touch on display

   Compare a tightly stippled passage in the sky or water against the looser, larger strokes on the bodies

   Matisse varies the stroke, denser and smaller touches in the atmosphere, broader ones on the figures, so the method itself is on show. The unevenness reads as a young painter testing a borrowed system rather than a doctrinaire pointillist, which fits the fact that he would abandon it within months.